I'm not sure if this is insightful enough to share here, but I'll try anyway.
A fair amount of wondering has been done about how FAI could figure out what humans actually want. A school of thought says persuasively that what we say we want is not what we actually want, so what we really want has to be extrapolated.
If we take the end-game promises of popular religions at face value, it occurs to me that Buddhism promises something between non-existence and wireheading (nirvana - "to blow out"), while Christianity promises wireheading (eternal bliss - heaven). I am not familiar enough with other religions to make statements about them.
In my anecdotal experience, it seems to me rationalists are quick to dismiss wireheading and non-existence as desirable possibilities. We experience this grasping desire to live, create, discover, and experience. We're not sure to what end, but we feel this indescribable zest, and we're convinced it's going to be great.
Look at people getting mental orgasms from Elon Musk launching a car into space. Whatever problems you have, space exploration is not going to solve them, and if your life is in harmony, you don't need space exploration. And yet there's this palpable zest about an unspoken implication... That perhaps an age of discovery is dawning, an age of adventure, an age of transcending our present problems and tackling larger ones. An age of being awesome.
There's a type of person that feels this zest, and this type is not a majority. The median person on Earth is confused by the world. They believe in things like Jesus Christ, and they press on in hope that adhering to divine guidance while they attempt to survive the trials and tribulations of life will be rewarded with not having to do this again. To such a person, the sight of two metal meteors descending from the sky with loud sonic booms, igniting engines and landing in synchrony does not necessarily inspire awe or enthusiasm as much as confusion and terror.
We, the few, are the seekers of something we cannot describe, and most of us find it hard to identify with the mindset of the median individual. The median individual does not want the excitement we seek, they just want an end... a release.
A lot of optimism towards life and the future (vs old-world desire for a different, better heaven, or the Eastern desire for oblivion) comes from the fact that we are living in a golden age and, for many of those of us who have access to computers and higher learning, golden parts of the planet. For most of human history, life was proverbially nasty, brutish, and short: the shortness was a mercy. Even today, we age; we accumulate psychic injuries as we lose pets, friends, and family and as we accumulate injuries and indignities. It makes one tired, but in our golden lives we can stay proverbially awake longer because it just doesn't wear us out as fast.
We catch our breaths in nearly religious awe at those boosters because they represent a pinnacle in the things that make our lives golden: science represents real miracles to us. Our lives are objectively better than they were for our ancestors. A lot of people around the world, even now, don't have access to these benefits; if anything, the boosters and the beautiful car in space may represent to them exclusion and the bifurcation of the population. Why would they show joy? chances are high that neither they nor their children will see much of the benefit. It trickles down in first world countries to some extent, but less so the further removed one is from the epicenter of the scientific miracle.